The Blog of Ian Claudius

Sealing with duct tape my friend’s care package (he’s a Marine stationed in Afghanistan), it struck me just how Spartan people are about some things, but demand total luxury in other, sometimes closely-related things.

• I am typing with a high-end MacBook Pro, and writing with a 10 cent BIC Cristal pen.
• My stickshift truck lacks power locks and windows, but has a stereo with both USB and iPod inputs.
• I wear Mizuno Wave Nirvana 4 running shoes with socks bought from Target, and Patagonia jackets over Wal-Mart shirts.

Seth is right: We specialize in everything.

There are many reasons why I am thankful for “wasting” so many years in the restaurant industry. A restaurant is a sort of microcosm of human social and business interaction. Problems occur and are solved (or blundered) in real-time. Sales and service are inextricably linked. And at the end of each night, all the servers drink and have sex.

I had a self-imposed rule that determined how I interacted with and treated my guests (if you worked at any decent restaurant, this is how you refer to “customers”). It arose out of a conversation I had with a manager at my very first job as a server:

Manager: “Ian, those are VIPs at table 5. Make sure you take real good care of them.”

Me: “Everyone’s a VIP.”

Manager: “Uh, yeah but they are [very important people].”

Me: “For me to treat them better would imply that I treat other people worse. I serve everyone the same way: Amazingly.”

I was tongue-in-cheek like this a lot (which is why most managers either loved or hated me), but I was serious about my main point. To me, this seems like a pretty good maxim for customer service. Just don’t let it fall into the traditional fate of maxims–that is, being engraved on a plaque, placed in the lobby and forgotten about.

I heard a radio ad the other night, for some sort of diabetes-related service. The beginning went something like this:

“If you are suffering from diabetes, let me personally recommend a number…”

The emphasis isn’t mine; the man accentuated the word himself. He even added a few syllables. The man went on to explain the merits of the service to all the diabetics listening at 3:30 in the morning, then concluded by repeating “that number again” a few dozen times.

If you’re wondering why I’m referring to him as “the man,” it’s because during the course of his heartfelt endorsement, he never identifies himself. (It definitely wasn’t Wilford Brimley.) So a [probably] nondiabetic, anonymous voice actor is lending his “personal” recommendation? I’m sure the Type 1’s and 2’s are united in song, for their troubles are over.

What’s so funny about this is not so much that it’s nonpersonal. Most traditional advertising still suffers from that. If anything, it’s antipersonal. In effect, the ad actually goes out of its way to mock credibility. Wouldn’t it make more business sense to establish it instead?

Of course. But it’s a lot easier to mock things than establish them.

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.

–Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

I once had a job doing CAD, and to say I was overqualified would be an understatement. I won the state industrial technology contest in high school. My teacher had me teach his classes the hard stuff. The expertise needed for the job was menial by comparison, so I finished tasks quickly, and got bored just as fast.

And speaking of menial, one of the tasks I was given involved making the most efficient use of raw material available–basically cutting a number of different pieces out of larger ones with the least amount of waste. I’ll simplify it a bit:

Let’s say you have access to 10 x 10 sheets of metal. If someone asked you for two 5 x 10 sheets, you would simply cut one stock piece in half, with no waste.

Now imagine you need six 5 x 5, and five 2 x 5 sheets. This requires a bit more thought, but can be pretty easily figured out like a puzzle. You can do it with two stock pieces, and no waste.

You’re probably seeing how fast the difficulty scales, so I’ll get to the punchline. What if your task were to cut 500 pieces, of all shapes and sizes? Or 10,000? Not only that, but what if you had many different sizes of stock to choose from?

I quickly realized what a pain in the ass this would be to do manually, by simply putting them together in the best way I could come up with. And even then, how did I know it was the most efficient pattern? All I was doing was trial and error, and the uncertainty got worse as the number of possible arrangements went up. It was mathematically ugly. I wanted beauty, I wanted the formula: X pieces cut from Y pieces with Z efficiency. So I tried to come up with one.

My bosses weren’t happy about how I was spending my time, so I placated them by explaining the potential of enormously reduced material cost and man-hours. And I still did my other work, but I could finish a typical workday in 1-2 hours, so I had plenty of spare time. I just wasn’t using it to surf the internet.

After a week or so of wracking my brain, I was dumbfounded and frustrated at my lack of progress. My roommate happened to be a computer science PhD student, so I asked him for help. Why is this so hard? And if you have any sort of math/comp sci background, you can probably guess his response:

“Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha”

Apparently, while playing around with some rectangles, I had stumbled upon one of the great problems of mathematics. It’s funny how quickly menial becomes profound, if you give it legs.

Being an artist or philosopher or scientist used to be a lot easier to dismiss as unrealistic. Not too long ago, your dreams were “shelter” or “food” or “water that doesn’t kill you.” Nowadays, there are still plenty of people that think this way, but as the economy reveals it to be more and more an excuse, there is a new one taking its place: “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know” might be the most important and productive expression since man first put word to meaning–when it’s punctuated with an ellipses, not a period.

“…but I’m going to find out” is the other half, of course.

Did I want to buckle down and revolutionize complexity theory? Hell no. But at least now I know that. There are many forms of laziness, but only one truly matters: Being too lazy to find out.

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Further reading: Opportunities

Copyblogger had a cool idea for a writing contest, using the limits imposed by Twitter. The idea is to tell a story in exactly 140 characters; no more, no less. I’m a little obsessed with brevity so I hopped aboard. Here’s my entry:

A politician by talent, the writer devoted himself to the illusion of effort. His initiative was praised; finality, ignored. That makes 140.

I don’t use Twitter much, as evidenced by the fact that that was my first post. But if you’d like to follow my account, here it is.